Audio Damage’s new Grind plugin comes with a warning: it’s neither subtle or polite. In fact, it’s billed as a “powerhouse of audio warfare” that can serve as a Swiss Army Knife of brutal sound design.
There are three main ‘blocks’ to work with: wavetable lookup feeds into algorithmic saturation/distortion and, finally, a multimode filter.
The wavetable module uses the amplitude of the incoming signal to replace the sample with one from 15 different linearly-interpolated wavetables, chosen for their mangling potential. Next, you choose from one of eleven different distortion and saturation algorithms, and there are the same number of filter models. There’s also a tempo-synced LFO to add motion to the filter frequency, and a final stage of soft clipping and DC filtering.
Grind’s true calling is as a destructive tool, but it can also be used for more traditional filtering and saturation purposes. It’s available for PC and Mac in VST/AU/AAX formats and costs $49. You can find out more on the Audio Damage website.
